The company that was supposed to take 3D printing to the masses has laid off a huge chunk of staff

3D printing company MakerBot is laying off 20% of its staff for
the second time in six months, CEO Jonathan Jaglom announced in a
blog post. The company let 80 staff go back in April, and now
the team is at less than 400.

Jaglom writes that the company has struggled to meet "ambitious
goals" thanks to the "broader challenges" in the industry.

Right now, according to Gartner's annual Hype
Cycle for Emerging Technologies report, 3D printing has been
out of the "hype" stage (when everyone gets really excited about
a new technology) for the last two years. But it could be another
five to 10 years before the tech really takes off with
consumers. So that means 3D printing is currently stuck in a
"trough of disillusionment" — a stage right after the hype for a
new technology reaches its peak and consumers begin to lose
interest.

It's at this point that companies in the space typically
either establish their permanence or fail.

Cofounder and former CEO Bre Pettis had previously talked
ambitiously about the future of 3D printing. "People draw a lot
of parallels between the personal computing industry and the
personal manufacturing industry," Pettis told Business Insider
back in 2012, "and there's a lot of similarities ... now, just
like the Altair and the Apple 1 and the homebrew days of homebrew
computing, you can now have a MakerBot ... The future's bright."

After the last round of layoffs the company pivoted to focus on
the education market, and shut down its
three retail stores in New York, Boston and Connecticut.
Around 5,000 schools across the US now have MakerBot printers.

The company is also moving its research and development staff
from a manufacturing complex in Brooklyn called Industry City to
its headquarters at MetroTech in Downtown Brooklyn so the teams
can work more efficiently together. But the MakerBot factory will
remain in Industry City, Jaglom writes. The company says that is
also going to outsourcethe production of
the previous (4th) generation of its printers, but will continue
to produce current and later generations itself.

Former MakerBot CEO Bre Prettis
stepped down in September last year, and was initially
replaced Jenny Lawton. But after a few months Jaglom took over.
He had previously worked for Stratasys, the massive 3D printing
company that bought MakerBot for more than $400 million (£260
million) in 2013.